MS114 Midterm (authors)

Fraser, N: “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere”

A transnational sphere does exist: discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states

Normative legitimacy and political efficacy of public opinion are essential to the concept of hte public sphere but they cannot be easily associated with discursive arenas of transnational public spheres

Habermas:

• Westphalian political public sphere: bounded political community with own territorial state 

• globalization forces us to rethink PS in transnaional frame 

• 6 social theoretical presuppositions: state, public, economy, media, language, and imaginary 

• critiques: 

  • Legitimacy: structural transformation obscured the existence of systemic obstacles that deprive some who are nomibally members of the public the capacity to participate with others as full partners in public debate (ex class inequalities)

  • Efficacy: structural transformation failed to register the full range of systemic obstacles that deprive discursively generated public opinion of political muscle 

Problematizing the Westphalian frame: 

• problems debated today are inherently trans-territorial and can neither be located within Westphalian space nor resolved by a Westphalian state

• transnational publicity is viewed as both a new development with globalization as a thing that has been transnational since the origin of the interstate system

rethinking public sphere:

• redefine legitimacy:

  • use all affected principle, not citizenship to define who must be included

  • legitimacy now requires participatory parity among all affected, wherever they are located

  • So all affected by a policy must be included, even if outside the state that makes decisions

• redefine efficacy:

  • public opinion must be able to address actual decision-making powers, which means imagining or building new transnational public authorities capable of being held accountable 

  • decisions now made by transnational, fragmented, non-elected bodies like WTO

  • transnational accountability channels

Stop thinking of the publics as national and stop assuming the state is the only addressee — instead, include all those affected across borders, and identify or create transnational powers that can be held accountable to those publics — otherwise, there is public talk without democratic force.

Castells, M: Cultural Change in a Globalized World

Cultural transformation evolves around a) the opposition between globalization and identification and b) the cleavage between individualism and communalism

• Cultural globalization: emergence of specific set of values and beliefs largely shared around the planet

• Cultural identification: existence of specific sets of values/beliefs in which specific human groups recognize themselves. Result of history/human organization + identity building.

• Individualism: beliefs that give priority to the satisfaction of needs, desires of each individual subject in their behavior.

• Communalism: beliefs that place the collective good of the community over individual satisfaction of members; community is a social system sharing cultural/material attributes.

3 levels of global culture: 1. Cosmopolianism 2. hybridization/remix of cultures 3. Culture of consumerism

2 bipolar axes: 

• globalization vs identification 

  • planetary shared values vs group belonging

• individualism vs communalism

  • self priority vs collective priority

4 cultural configurations

• branded consumerism: (individualism/globalization)

  • identity is shaped through consumption and global capitalism 

  • branding: important expression of this individual relationship, cultural dimension of global market and the process by which individuals assign meaning to their consumerism

• networked individualism: (identification/individualism)

  • individuals build personal media networks instead of fixed group ties

  • people construct culture in terms of preferences and projects, modifying to personal interests and values 

• cosmopolitanism: (communalism/globalization)

  • project of sharing collective values on a planetary scale and building a human community that transcends boundaries and specificity on behalf of a superior principle

• multiculturalism (communalism/identification)

  • recognition of multiple identities in a world constituted by a diversity of cultural communities

Examples of global media shaping culture

• branded consumerism: ugly betty

  • shift from news to entertainment — broadens the scope of consumerism to the social and political realm, mostly through the Hollywood industrial complex

    • ideologically charged thesis of cultural imperialism assimilated to one-sided domination of American culture over all other cultures

    • Global culture is not an American culture although the US has disproportionate power

  • Ugly Betty: telenovela from Colombia that penetrated the mainstream market, was remade globally, and not one-way Americanism

    • the global entertainment industry is the main channel for the construction of consumerist/branded culture

Cosmopolitanism: 

• global media news networks want communicative public sphere

  • space where countries and cultures brought together for 24-hour global info shift 

  • This is 

Multiculturalism:

• norm rather than exception, extraordinary diversity of cultural production and distribution

culture of network individualism:

• internet, wireless communication, online games, digital networks of cultural production

• Internet is the exclusive domain of individualism and an instrument for the diffusion of consumerism and global entertainment, co

Global media produce not one culture but a cultural space where consumerism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and networked individualism coexist.

Culture is now a mechanism of power and production in the global network society, not an ornament on top of it

Osgood, K: Cold War Politics

Ritzer, G: An Introduction to McDonaldization

Klein, C: “Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho”

• Media imperialism is not the end but only one stage of Korean film 

• Bong is self-reflective in his use of foreign genres and uses them as commentary 

  1. “Genre collision/subversion” rather than adoption defines Bong’s film style

  1. Bong’s strategy of genre collision keeps viewers off balance and makes it difficult for them to settle into the comforting familiarity of genre expectations

• Genre Collision/Subversion: mixing different genre conventions in contradictory, overlapping, and subversive ways disrupts audience expectations associated with those genres.

• Subverting genre expectations forces viewers to think critically about the political or historical issues embedded in the story

  1. American studies should use genre for transnational analysis 

• Transnational genres: refer to genre films that travel across borders and are re-worked in local contexts. Genre serves as a specific cultural space where we can see the transnational dynamics of circulation, appropriation, and indigenization at work.”

  1. Ambivalent Bong: used by or using Hollywood?

  1. Shift in emphasis from production to consumption as a focus of analysis 

• Consumption points to a more complex picture than imperialist models 

  1. Bong “appropriates” Hollywood; not imitation, but a symbolic dimension of the films 

• Ex. crime procedural used to capture “deep crime” of Korean society 

• Appropriation/Negotiation/Exchange: non-US filmmakers do not simply copy Hollywood, but assemble the LEGO pieces of the crime film or monster movie in new ways to retain kinship with Hollywood while addressing local specificity

  1. Ambivalence toward Hollywood: Korean cinema, and specifically Bong's films, expresses “ambivalent relationships with US cultural and political power 

• Ex. through the legacy of the US military presence in Korea

  1. Can hybridity in Korean art overcome cultural imperialism?

  1. Case study: The Host (2006) dir. Bong Joon Ho

  1. Klein: Use of genre indicates self-aware hybridity

• Example: police procedural/horror, imported genres tweaked in meaningful ways 

• Hybridization/local specificity: local history, politics, and context affect genre conventions to produce something distinctly Korean and globally understandable

Tyson, T: Radio Free Dixie

Robert F. Williams

• NAACP leader, but was viewed as too radical and was pushed out

• “Negroes with Guns” (book)

  • Argues ballot or bullet, here's the bullet, trained in the military (got a charter from the NRA to defend Black people from the KKK)

  • Argued for a more robust response to white supremacy

• Fled Monroe, NC

  • Went with Freedom Riders into the South, the FBI used a narrative that he kidnapped white people (because he was riding on integrated freedom rider buses), issued a warrant for his arrest

  • Fled to NYC, swapped clothes in bathroom, got on plane to Cuba

• 1961 Cuba: broadcast to the South on Radio Havana

• Starts Radio Free Dixie - 2 hours given to him to broadcast all over the American South, encouraging people to rise up against oppressive whites

• Had a falling out with communists in Cuba, they wanted to solve the class problem first, he argued that American racism was about race

• 
  

• Radio Free Dixie content:

• Jazz, blues, and racial justice messages

• Black American musical traditions and innovations

  • Highlighted black art and culture

• Introduced a “new psychological” type of propaganda

  • Mixed commentary with music in a new way

  • Mixed cultural music with news about racial violence, or voter campaigns to entice people to action

• CIA jammed signal; FBI monitored, Cuba censored

•